Pony Island is an action adventure puzzle game developed and published by Daniel Mullins Games and released on Windows in 2016. In the game, you are a person who has unwittingly played an arcade game called "Pony Island" which was actually created by Lucifer, and your soul becomes trapped in it where it is tortured by being forced to play a terribly dull game. However, by working with another other lost soul, you try to corrupt the game's memory so the game will become unplayable. However, Lucifer is also in the game and is trying to stop you.

The game uses a multi-genre model. Action sequences require you to avoid obstacles and shoot enemies. Puzzle sequences require logical thinking similar to computer programming. And, over all, the game has a mysterious adventure backdrop.

I got Pony Island as part of a Humble Bundle, and decided to play it based on the title and screenshots. I very much enjoyed it.

Contents

Status

I own this game and have beaten it with 15 achievements and 11 tickets.

Review

Overall: 6/10

Best Version: Windows

Good

The story is a lot of fun. I like communicating with in-game actors, trying to crack into secure systems on fake operating systems, and the like.

The game has a nice challenge without ever becoming annoyingly difficult.

The action elements, while dull at first, become more complex as you go. This keeps them interesting, but they also never become tedious.

I love the corruption effects as the game becomes more broken. They are really well-made.

There is a lot of creepy humor, especially in the Asmodeus battle.

The programming puzzles are really cool.

I enjoyed the music quite a bit.

The hidden tickets adds a lot of life to the game.

It was really cool seeing the game as Pony Island the way an arcade player would see it. All the deadly monsters are now butterflies and the demon is represented as Jesus, whom you have to kill!

Bad

The game is too short. I beat it in a single sitting.

I think a lot more could have been done with the programming puzzles, and they weren't pushed to their full potential. Maybe incorporating other CPU primitives like a stack, flags, interactive branching, etc.

I know it's purposely meant to have primitive graphics, but even still, they're not that great.

I didn't like the lost soul's plea for you to delete the game at the end.

Not so much a bad thing, but I wonder how the game would be if you first started playing the cute version of Pony Island before becoming sucked in rather than starting out already in the evil version. Although, this may have been too formulaic.